News breaks that the latest Call of Duty game will be unveiled tonight on Gametrailers. It’s called Call of Duty: Vietnam, it’s being made by Treyarch and – er – that’s it. Vietnam based games have… well, they’ve traditionally not fared as well as other operational theatres. You have to kind of feel sorry for Treyarch operating under a double shadow – both the continuing high-level corporate drama of The Infinity Ward Wars and having to try and make a game that actually works out of a setting which has proved incredibly awkward to translate. I have to wish them luck, and hope they can do something to skew the numbers on the traditional “In World War II the average mark of the combat game was 82%… it Vietnam it was 49%” style gags. Which sounds like a cue for a song…

I have never played a game by Treyarch so can’t comment on the quality of their games. But in some of interviews I’ve seen with folks from that studio some of them come across as unoriginal and cocky. Lets hope we don’t end up with a game that rips off everything that’s cool at the moment without doing anything original.

Well the jungle level in World at War (also by Treyarch) worked pretty well, so I’m pretty sure they could do it. Treyarch’s CoD games tend to be pretty well put together (they’re solid, if you will), they just lack that extra spark of inventiveness that Infinity Ward has/had.

I just hope that for once in their lives they can get the multiplayer balance right, and if they don’t, that they’ll actually try to fix it this time around instead of flat out giving up to produce map packs (all of which we got for free on PC, admittedly, so their post-release support has been stellar, at least on World at War).

…If you were playing as the americans. The balancing was AWFUL though. The americans had superior guns, vehicles, everything. Had someone had the balls to set the game so that the vietnamese had twice as many players it could’ve been a great game.

Vietnam invokes so many shades of moral grey that making a ManFaceShoot game about it is a tough job. I hope Treyarch have the moxie to compose their own ‘No Russian’ moments, (Perhaps with more insight, but all of the same impact.), and tell a story that reflects the lessons that war taught. Best of luck getting that past the publishers suits.

A Vietnam game can work now. You know why? Because they’ve figured out how to model convincing trees and fire. I enjoyed the Vietcong games as much as the next man, but there was only so much they could do at the time.

On paper, Vietnam should be a brilliant choice for games. It has everything going for it – a great setting, great music, awesomer weapons than WW2, tons of material for them to reference (as CoD 1&2 did with WW2 movies), and so on.

Have the player switch between regular grunt work and MACV-SOG and they could be on to something.

Being that the Vietnamese sort of won(ish) the war in the end, id like be able to play on their side as opposed to just being another american soldier all the way through it.

having to crawl through jungle tunnels and sneak into american military bases would be great, it would work better with the single player letting you use the jungle to ambush american patrols and things, then giving you river boats and heli’s for when you play as the US.

Anonymous Coward said:
Well the jungle level in World at War (also by Treyarch) worked pretty well

As one of the reviewers put it… “you could just be marching through another European town with a lot more trees.” – something I have to stand by even though I liked WaW and consider it better than MW overall.

Will there be a “No My Lai” level? Or, what about a “No Kent State University, Ohio” level?

I don’t think you can really make ‘Nam into a shooter in the CoD/MW style. Crouching in a damp fox-hole firing at an area of jungle 25 feet away from you. I suppose it’ll save time on enemy model animations, ‘cos you probably won’t see them (clearly) when they’re alive… just flashes in amongst the jungle. Only ‘Nam gaming experience I had that was any good was an OFP mod/map… It was heavily scripted, and involved a FMJ “Tet cease fire” style attack on your position (you couldn’t ‘win’, it was made that you would eventually be overwhelmed).

I was thinking that they’d probably have to do a My Lai like thing since that’s kinda what COD does now. I’m not sure if they can do it so it’s not in extraordinarily poor taste. It might be an interesting ‘sequel’ to No Russian if you have to stop your own troops from massacre-ing a bunch of civilians some how (hard to imagine working that well. Shooter AI has never been that great at dealing with things any other way besides deadly force).

Mixing up the incidents at the front and back home, however, could be really something.

You know Call of Duty has been treating familiar ground since the first one. I’m gonna say that CoD style combat is TOTALLY wrong for Vietnam, endlessly respawning enemies popping obviously in and out of cover, but if they actually make a break from what the series has been this could be very very good.

Vietcong was a bloody great game, its about time we had a follow up worthy of the name.